Search form

Face to Faiths

Today sees the last in the series of Westminster Faith Debates, which have been going on since February at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall. Organised by Lancaster University and the think-tank Theos and chaired by Charles Clarke, the former cabinet minister, the sessions have explored various aspects of the intersection of religion and politics, from the place of religious education in schools to the highly controversial role of faith-based initiatives in plugging the increasingly obvious holes in the welfare system.

The debates have brought together social scientists with politicians, media pundits and religious leaders. Speakers have included Trevor Phillips, Richard Dawkins, Rabbi Julia Neuberger and the New Statesman's own MehdiHasan. Elizabeth Hunter, the director of Theos, told me that for her the best element of the series has been the breadth of the audience. "We've filled the room with committed, interested people of all faiths and no faith," she says. "It's been unusually diverse and engaged, which has meant the Q and As have been lively and often challenging."

Hunter singled out last month's debate on religious freedom, which featured Michael Nazir Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, and Lisa Appignanesi among others, as her own personal highlight: "We had a real range of opinions on the panel, and indeed in the audience, but the discussion was serious, not consensual, but civil. So many people said to be afterwards that it was the best thing they've seen on the subject. Most of the public conversation about religious freedom and equality descends into tribal mudslinging and this was very different."

The debates were certainly well-timed. The first four months of the year have witnessed an extraordinary cranking-up of tension, at least in terms of the public debate around religion and society. The tone was set during that remarkable week in February when Baroness Warsi went to the Vatican to warn the Pope about militant secularism while Richard Dawkins, highlighting research that suggested declining religious literacy even among professed believers, memorably fluffed a challenge from Dr Giles Fraser to recall the full title of The Origin of Species.

This past week has seen more of the same, with the British Humanist Association extending its campaign against faith schools and Catholic educators under fire for (as they see it) defending the traditional understanding of marriage. In between we've had rows about proposed "gay cure" bus adverts, the legality of council prayers and the future of the bishops in a reformed House of Lords.

Why is all this happening now? It's common to date the current, fevered debate on the place of faith in modern Britain to the fallout from 9/11 or, beyond that, to the Rushdie affair of the late 1980s. But both those traumatic events are beginning to recede into history. Both "offence" and terrorism remain big, unresolved issues but the focus today is less dramatic and more fundamental: it's about how to maintain a cohesive society with increasingly few shared beliefs and assumptions.

The first Westminster debate, back in February, raised the issue of "superdiversity" which goes to the heart of the issue. Under the principle of "diversity", which forms the basis of much recent legislation (notably the 2010 Equality Act) people claim rights as members of communities, whether defined by reference to their ethnicity, their sexuality, their physical capacity or their religious adherence.

This makes things nice and simple for lawmakers and the courts, even if it gives endless scope for litigation and encourages something of a grievance culture. But it's a blunt instrument, and outdated even as the ink was drying on the last piece of legislation. People have multiple identities, which change through life and may find themselves in tension even within the same individual. Religion is one way in which people define themselves. For some it is of supreme importance, for others it's peripheral, or others still it is (as the Facebook status offers) "complicated." One size does not fit all. Everyone is, to some extent, their own "community".

In her presentation tonight on the subject of current trends, Professor Linda Woodhead of Lancaster University (who has been leading the debates) will argue that what we call religion has changed dramatically in recent years. Whereas it was once bound up with local and national community it has become something individual and individually chosen. It's no longer "a matter of belonging to a clerically-led community, affirming unchanging dogma and holding conservative social attitudes". Claims by "male leaders to represent religious communities are more tenuous than before." It's all about "associating with like-minded people through real or virtual networks".

Yet if religious diversity is just another manifestation of modern capitalist consumerism, as such a view would imply, why does it remain so politically, and personally, charged? And take the ultimate hierarchical, clerically-led and dogma-affirming religious institution, the Roman Catholic Church. Under pressure it might be, but it is precisely those features that Woodhead singles out as problematic that self-identifying (rather than merely cultural) Catholics find most attractive and that are growing. There has recently been a small increase in the number of women training to be nuns, for example, and younger nuns are more likely to join traditional, habit-wearing convents than the more liberal orders whose American leaders have recently annoyed the Vatican.

What I would want to say, contrary to Woodhead's rather optimistic conclusions, is that religion has very little to do with personal spirituality, although it has traditionally been the main vehicle through which personal spirituality is expressed. Far more central, historically, has been its role as a mechanism of group cohesion, as a social glue and as a source of communal morality. That's why it has always been closely involved with politics, and perhaps why the decline of formal religious observance has coincided with a similar decline in membership of political parties, voting and faith in the political process as a whole.

In religion as in politics, what is left when most ordinary people get bored is a hard core of committed and slightly obsessive activists -- moderates as well as extremists, by the way, scoffers as well as true believers. When the enthusiasts on all sides no longer represent a social consensus or a mass activity, the debates get more, not less, heated.

Nevertheless, as Hunter says, religion still is and will continue to be central to many people's lives. "If we don't engage and understand it, if we're not willing to really listen and have serious conversations about how we live together well then we're all in trouble." Recent months have demonstrated that beyond all doubt.

The Brexit Beartraps, #2: Could dropping out of the open skies agreement cancel your holiday?

So what is it this time, eh? Brexit is going to wipe out every banana planet on the entire planet? Brexit will get the Last Night of the Proms cancelled? Brexit will bring about World War Three?

To be honest, I think we’re pretty well covered already on that last score, but no, this week it’s nothing so terrifying. It’s just that Brexit might get your holiday cancelled.

What are you blithering about now?

Well, only if you want to holiday in Europe, I suppose. If you’re going to Blackpool you’ll be fine. Or Pakistan, according to some people...

You’re making this up.

I’m honestly not, though we can’t entirely rule out the possibility somebody is. Last month Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair boss who attracts headlines the way certain other things attract flies, warned that, “There is a real prospect... that there are going to be no flights between the UK and Europe for a period of weeks, months beyond March 2019... We will be cancelling people’s holidays for summer of 2019.”

He’s just trying to block Brexit, the bloody saboteur.

Well, yes, he’s been quite explicit about that, and says we should just ignore the referendum result. Honestly, he’s so Remainiac he makes me look like Dan Hannan.

But he’s not wrong that there are issues: please fasten your seatbelt, and brace yourself for some turbulence.

Not so long ago, aviation was a very national sort of a business: many of the big airports were owned by nation states, and the airline industry was dominated by the state-backed national flag carriers (British Airways, Air France and so on). Since governments set airline regulations too, that meant those airlines were given all sorts of competitive advantages in their own country, and pretty much everyone faced barriers to entry in others.

The EU changed all that. Since 1994, the European Single Aviation Market (ESAM) has allowed free movement of people and cargo; established common rules over safety, security, the environment and so on; and ensured fair competition between European airlines. It also means that an AOC – an Air Operator Certificate, the bit of paper an airline needs to fly – from any European country would be enough to operate in all of them.

Do we really need all these acronyms?

No, alas, we need more of them. There’s also ECAA, the European Common Aviation Area – that’s the area ESAM covers; basically, ESAM is the aviation bit of the single market, and ECAA the aviation bit of the European Economic Area, or EEA. Then there’s ESAA, the European Aviation Safety Agency, which regulates, well, you can probably guess what it regulates to be honest.

All this may sound a bit dry-

It is.

-it is a bit dry, yes. But it’s also the thing that made it much easier to travel around Europe. It made the European aviation industry much more competitive, which is where the whole cheap flights thing came from.

In a speech last December, Andrew Haines, the boss of Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority said that, since 2000, the number of destinations served from UK airports has doubled; since 1993, fares have dropped by a third. Which is brilliant.

Brexit, though, means we’re probably going to have to pull out of these arrangements.

Stop talking Britain down.

Don’t tell me, tell Brexit secretary David Davis. To monitor and enforce all these international agreements, you need an international court system. That’s the European Court of Justice, which ministers have repeatedly made clear that we’re leaving.

So: last March, when Davis was asked by a select committee whether the open skies system would persist, he replied: “One would presume that would not apply to us” – although he promised he’d fight for a successor, which is very reassuring.

We can always holiday elsewhere.

Perhaps you can – O’Leary also claimed (I’m still not making this up) that a senior Brexit minister had told him that lost European airline traffic could be made up for through a bilateral agreement with Pakistan. Which seems a bit optimistic to me, but what do I know.

Intercontinental flights are still likely to be more difficult, though. Since 2007, flights between Europe and the US have operated under a separate open skies agreement, and leaving the EU means we’re we’re about to fall out of that, too.

Surely we’ll just revert to whatever rules there were before.

Apparently not. Airlines for America – a trade body for... well, you can probably guess that, too – has pointed out that, if we do, there are no historic rules to fall back on: there’s no aviation equivalent of the WTO.

The claim that flights are going to just stop is definitely a worst case scenario: in practice, we can probably negotiate a bunch of new agreements. But we’re already negotiating a lot of other things, and we’re on a deadline, so we’re tight for time.

In fact, we’re really tight for time. Airlines for America has also argued that – because so many tickets are sold a year or more in advance – airlines really need a new deal in place by March 2018, if they’re to have faith they can keep flying. So it’s asking for aviation to be prioritised in negotiations.

The only problem is, we can’t negotiate anything else until the EU decides we’ve made enough progress on the divorce bill and the rights of EU nationals. And the clock’s ticking.

This is just remoaning. Brexit will set us free.

A little bit, maybe. CAA’s Haines has also said he believes “talk of significant retrenchment is very much over-stated, and Brexit offers potential opportunities in other areas”. Falling out of Europe means falling out of European ownership rules, so itcould bring foreign capital into the UK aviation industry (assuming anyone still wants to invest, of course). It would also mean more flexibility on “slot rules”, by which airports have to hand out landing times, and which are I gather a source of some contention at the moment.

But Haines also pointed out that the UK has been one of the most influential contributors to European aviation regulations: leaving the European system will mean we lose that influence. And let’s not forget that it was European law that gave passengers the right to redress when things go wrong: if you’ve ever had a refund after long delays, you’ve got the EU to thank.

So: the planes may not stop flying. But the UK will have less influence over the future of aviation; passengers might have fewer consumer rights; and while it’s not clear that Brexit will mean vastly fewer flights, it’s hard to see how it will mean more, so between that and the slide in sterling, prices are likely to rise, too.

It’s not that Brexit is inevitably going to mean disaster. It’s just that it’ll take a lot of effort for very little obvious reward. Which is becoming something of a theme.

Still, we’ll be free of those bureaucrats at the ECJ, won’t be?

This’ll be a great comfort when we’re all holidaying in Grimsby.

Jonn Elledge edits the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric, and writes for the NS about subjects including politics, history and Brexit. You can find him on Twitter or Facebook.